On Something (Dodo Press) (10 page)

Perhaps it is best to begin by pointing out how rarely even the best of us
pause in our fevered race for wealth to consider the disabilities of any
of our fellow-creatures: when that truth is grasped it will be easier to
plead the special cause of the Simian.

Were English men and women to realize the wrongs of the Race, or at any
rate the illogical and therefore unjust position in which we have placed
them; were the just and thoughtful men, the refined and golden-hearted
ladies who are ready in this country to support every good cause when it
is properly presented; were
they
to realize the disabilities of the
Monkey, I do not say as vividly they realize the tragedies and misfortunes
of London life, they could not, I think, avoid an ill-ease, a pricking of
conscience, which would lead at last to some hearty and English effort for
the relief of the cousin and forerunner of man.

The attitude adopted towards Monkeys by the mass of those who, after all,
live in the same world, and have much the same appetites and necessities
and sufferings as they, is an attitude I am persuaded, not of
heartlessness, but of ignorance. To disturb that ignorance, and in some to
awake a consciousness which, perhaps, they fear, is not a grateful task,
but it is our duty, and we will pursue it.

Let the reader consider for one moment the aspect not only of formal law
but of the whole community, and of what is called "public opinion" towards
this section of sentient beings.

As things now are—aye! and have been for centuries in this green England
of ours—a Monkey may not marry; he may not own land; he may not fill any
salaried post under the Crown. The Papists themselves are debarred from
no honour (outside Ireland) save the Lord Chancellorship. Monkeys, who
are responsible for no persecutions in the past, whose religion presents
no insult or outrage to our common reason, and who differ little from
ourselves in their general practice of life and thought,
are debarred
from all
!

A Monkey may not be a Member of Parliament, a Civil Servant, an officer
in either Service, no, not even in the Territorial Army. It is doubtful
whether he may hold a commission for the peace. True, there is no statute
upon the subject, and the rural magistracy is perhaps the freest and most
open of all our offices, and the least restricted by artificial barriers
of examination or test; nevertheless, it is the considered opinion of the
best legal authorities that no Monkey could sit upon the Bench, and in any
case the discussion is purely academic, for it is difficult to believe
that any Lord-Lieutenant, under the ridiculous anachronism of our present
Constitution, would nominate a Monkey to such a position—unless (which is
by law impossible) he should be heir to an owner of an estate in land.

Nor is this all. The mention of unpaid posts recalls the damning truth
that all honorary positions in the Diplomatic Service, including even the
purely formal stage in the Foreign Office, are closed to the Monkey; the
very Court sinecures, which admittedly require no talents, are denied to
our Simian fellow-creatures, if not by law at least by custom and in
practice.

There have been employed by the League in the British Museum the services
of two ladies who feel most keenly upon this subject. They are (to the
honour of their sex) as amply qualified as any person in this kingdom for
the task which they have undertaken, and they report to the Executive
Commission after two months of minute research that (with one doubtful
exception occurring during the reign of Her late Majesty) no Monkey has
held any position whatever at Court.

All judicial positions are equally inaccessible to them; for though,
perhaps, in theory a Monkey could be promoted to the Bench if he had
served his party sufficiently long and faithfully in the House of Commons
(to which body he is admissible—at least I can find no rule or custom,
let alone a statute, against it), yet he is cut off from such an ambition
at the very outset by his inadmissibility to a legal career. The Inns of
Court are monopolist, and, like all monopolists, hopelessly conservative.
They have admitted first one class and then another—though reluctantly—
to their privileges, but it will be twenty or thirty years at least
before they will give way in the matter of Monkeys. To be a physician,
a solicitor, an engineer, or a Commissioner for Oaths is denied them as
effectually as though they did not exist. Indeed, no occupation is left
them save that of manual labour, and on this I would say a word. It is
fashionable to jeer at the Monkey's disinclination to sustained physical
effort and to concentrated toil; but it is remarkable that those who
affect such a contempt for the Monkey's powers are the first to deny him
access to the liberal professions in which they know (though they dare not
confess it) he would be a serious rival to the European. As it is, in the
few places open to Monkeys—the somewhat parasitical domestic occupation
of "companions" and the more manly, but still humiliating, task of acting
as assistants to organ-grinders, the Monkey has won universal if grudging
praise.

Latterly, since progress cannot be indefinitely delayed, the Monkey has
indeed advanced by one poor step towards the civic equality which is his
right, and has appeared as an actor upon the boards of our music-halls. It
should surely be a sufficient rebuke for those who continue to sneer at
the Simian League and such devoted pioneers as Miss Greeley and Lady Wayne
that the Monkey has been honourably admitted and has done first-rate work
in a profession which His late Gracious Majesty and His late Majesty's
late revered mother, Queen Victoria, have seen fit to honour by the
bestowal of knighthoods, and in one case (where the recipient was
childless) of a baronetcy.

The disabilities I have enumerated are by no means exhaustive. A Monkey
may not sign or deliver a deed; he may not serve on a jury; he may be
ill-treated, forsooth, and even killed by some cruel master, and the
law will refuse to protect him or to punish his oppressor. He may be
subjected to all the by-laws of a tyrannical or fanatical administration,
but in preventing such abuses he has no voice. He may not enter our
older Universities, at least as the member of a college; that is, he can
only take a degree at Oxford or Cambridge under the implied and wholly
unmerited stigma applying to the non-collegiate student. And these
iniquities apply not only to the great anthropoids whose strength and
grossness we might legitimately fear, but to the most delicately organized
types—to the Barbary Ape, the Lemur, and the Ring-tailed Baboon.
Finally—and this is the worst feature in the whole matter—a Monkey, by
a legal fiction at least as old as the fourteenth century, is not a person
in the eye of the law.

We call England a free country, yet at the present day and as you read
these lines,
any Monkey found at large may be summarily arrested
.
He has no remedy; no action for assault will lie. He is not even allowed
to call witnesses in his own defence, or to establish an alibi.

It may be pleaded that these disabilities attach also to the Irish, but we
must remember that the Irish are allowed a certain though modified freedom
of the Press, and have extended to them the incalculable advantage of
sending representatives to Westminster. The Monkey has no such remedies.
He may be incarcerated, nay
chained
, yet he cannot sue out a writ
for habeas corpus any more than can a British subject in time of war, and
worst of all, through the connivance or impotence of the police, cases
have been brought forward
and approved
in which Monkeys have been
openly bought and sold!

We boast our sense of delicacy, and perhaps rightly, in view of our
superiority over other nations in this particular; yet we permit the
Monkey to exhibit revolting nakedness, and we hardly heed the omission!
It is true that some Monkeys are covered from time to time with little
blue coats. A cap is occasionally disdainfully permitted them, and not
infrequently they are permitted a pair of leather breeches, through a hole
in which the tail is permitted to protrude; but no reasonable man will
deny that these garments are regarded in the light of mere ornaments, and
rarely fulfil those functions which every decent Englishman requires of
clothing.

And now we come to the most important section of our appeal.
What can
be done
?

We are a kindly people and we are a just people, but we are also a very
conservative people. The fate of all pioneers besets those who attempt to
move in this matter. They are jeered at, or, what is worse, neglected. One
of the most prominent of the League's workers has been certified a lunatic
by an authority whose bitter prejudice is well known, and against whom we
have as yet had no grant of a
mandamus
, and we have all noticed the
quiet contempt, the sort of organized boycott or conspiracy of silence
with which a company at dinner will receive the subject when it is brought
forward.

There are also to be met the violent prejudices with which the mass of
the population is still filled in this regard. These prejudices are, of
course, more common among the uneducated poor than in the upper classes,
who in various relations come more often in contact with Monkeys, and who
also have a wider and more tolerant, because a better cultivated, spirit.
But the prejudice is discernible in every class of society, even in the
very highest. We have also arrayed against us in our crusade for right and
justice the dying but still formidable power of clericalism. Society is
but half emancipated from its medieval trammels, and the priest, that
Eternal Enemy of Liberty, can still put in his evil word against the
rights of the Simian.

Let us not despair! We can hope for nothing, it is true, until we have
effected a profound change in public opinion, and that change cannot
be effected by laws. It can only be brought about by a slow and almost
imperceptible effort, unsleeping, tireless, and convinced: something of
the same sort as has destroyed the power of militarism upon the Continent
of Europe; something of the same sort as has scotched landlordism at home;
something of the same sort as has freed the unhappy natives of the Congo
from the misrule of depraved foreigners; something of the same sort as has
produced the great wave in favour of temperance through the length and
breadth of this land.

We must not attempt extremes or demand full justice to the exclusion of
excellent half-measures. No one condemns more strongly than do we the
militant pro-Simians who have twice assaulted and once blinded for life a
keeper in the Zoological Gardens. We do not even approve of those ardent
but in our opinion misguided spirits of the Simian Freedom Society who
publish side by side the photographs of Pongo the learned Ape from the
Gaboons and that of a certain Cabinet Minister, accompanied by the legend
"Which is Which?" It is not by actions of this kind that we shall win the
good fight; but rather by a perseverance in reason combined with courtesy
shall we attain our end, until at long last our Brother shall be free! As
for the excellent but somewhat provincial reactionaries who still object
to us that the Monkey differs fundamentally from the human race; that he
is not possessed of human speech, and so forth, we can afford to smile at
their waning authority. Modern science has sufficiently dealt with them;
and if any one bring out against the Monkey the obscurantist insult that
His Hide is Covered with Hair, we can at once point to innumerable human
beings, fully recognized and endowed with civic rights, who, were they
carefully examined, would prove in no better case. As to speech, the
Monkey communicates in his own way as well or better than do we, and for
that matter, if speech is to be the criterion, are we to deny civic rights
to the Dumb?

We have it upon the authority of all our greatest scientific men, that
there is no substantial difference between the Ape and Man. One of the
greatest has said that between himself and his poorer fellow-citizens
there was a wider difference than that which separated them from the
Monkey. Hackel has testified that while there is a
boundary
, there
is no
gulf
between the corps of professors to which he belongs and
the Chimpanzee. The Gorilla is universally accepted, and if we have won
the battle for the Gorilla, the rest will follow.

Tolstoy is with us, Webb is with us, Gorky is with us, Zola and Ferrer
were with us and fight for us from their graves. The whole current of
modern thought is with us. WE CANNOT FAIL!

Questions submitted at the last Election by the Simian League

1. Are you in favour of removing the present disabilities of Monkeys?

2. Are you in favour of a short Statute which should put adult Monkeys
upon the same footing as other subjects of His Majesty as from the 1st of
January, 1912? And
would you, if necessary, vote against your party in
favour of such a measure?

3. Are you in favour of the inclusion of Monkeys under the Wild Birds Act?

(A plain reply "Yes" or "No" was to be written by the candidate under each
of these questions and forwarded to the Secretary, Mr. Consul, 73 Purbeck
Street, W.. before the 14th January, 1910. No replies received after
that date were admitted. The Simian League, which has agents in every
constituency, acted according to the replies received, and treated
the lack of reply as a negative. Of 1375 circulars sent, 309 remained
unanswered, 264 were answered in the negative, 201 gave a qualified
affirmative,
all the rest (no less than 799) a clear and, in some
cases, an enthusiastic adherence to our principles
. It is a sufficient
proof of the power of the League and the growth of the cause of justice
that in these 799 no less than 515 are members of the present House of
Commons.)